A widely respected authority on contracts law, Avery W. Katz has produced scholarship on topics ranging from option contracts to contractual incompleteness, contract theory, and fee shifting. He has taught courses including Contracts, Commercial Transactions, Deals, Payment Systems, Sales Transactions: Domestic and International, Secured Transactions, and Economic Reasoning and the Law.
Earlier in his career, Katz held several professorships at the University of Michigan: assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of law, and professor of law. He joined Georgetown University Law Center as professor of law and director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. Later, Katz served as an Olin Faculty Research fellow at Yale University, a visiting professor of law at Georgetown in 1992 and 1994, and a visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School in 1998.
Katz joined the Law School faculty full-time in 2000 and served as vice dean for curriculum for 12 years, from 2006 to 2018. In this role, Katz worked closely in partnership with faculty to introduce innovative new courses and to strengthen the adjunct instructors program, including recruiting hundreds of instructors and mentoring them in the classroom.
He served as chair of the section on law and economics at the American Association of Law Schools (2001), Scholar in Residence at the New York University School of Law (2004), editor of the International Review of Law and Economics (2003 to 2013), and member of the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association (2003 to 2006). Katz currently sits on the advisory board for Contracts and Commercial Law Abstracts.
Katz earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University, his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, and his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan.